Free E-Newsletters: are they worth your time?

Free E-Newsletters: are they worth your time?

I have a lot of respect for music professionals who take the time to share their expertise with us through free e-newsletters. OK they are often a marketing tool for subscription courses, but that doesn't take away from the fact that they can be very valuable resources.  Even if we are fortunate enough to take regular guitar lessons from a pro, we are unlikely to be exposed to the resources available to a music major, not to mention the learning that comes by way of studying with like minded musicians.  These newsletters usually link to blogs from guitar professionals, and provide a lot of useful information.

So here are my top 5:

I really like the posts by Noa Kageyama on bulletproofmusician.com   He is actually a violinist but teaches performance psychology at Juilliard, as such most of his posts relate to practice, memorization and performance.  I particularly appreciate that his posts are all based on published research.

You should also check out Simon Powis' Classicalguitarcorner.com   He has links to instructional materials, podcasts (usually interviews with famous guitarists) and some of the videos and other materials from his lessons.  He is an engaging speaker and well worth a look.

Another good site is Bradford Werner's Thisisclassicalguitar.com  He also has some instructional videos, but a lot of his links are to the latest youtube postings by excellent guitarists - a great place to check out who is up and coming in the guitar world.

Speaking of instructional videos - if you are on the stringsbymail mailing list you will get links to the latest instructional videos by Gohar Vardanian at www.stringsbymail.com/videos/ .  Impressive!

Finally and on a different note, have a look at Tommasilo Zillio's Musictheoryforguitar.com  Not really classical  - he plays electric and ot can be a bit annoying to plough through some of his promotional material but he has some good videos. I recently viewed one on improvising using sixths..

Happy Browsing!